Chapter 05 | The Cronqvist

The Friday group chat had been running for three years, and in that time Matthias had used it mostly to confirm whether the lunch place near the office was still open and to send a single annual birthday message to each member, the content of which never varied. That morning, he opened it and typed something he had never sent before.

Bringing a friend to the new house tonight. Preparing a small feast if possible, it's Friday. A pause. Then, because it still struck him as faintly surreal to be sending domestic messages to two immortals: Please prepare accordingly. Thank you.

Belial's response arrived in under forty seconds: a string of enthusiastic affirmatives and a provisional menu.

Astreal's response arrived four seconds after that: a single line confirming she had already begun adjusting the inventory.

He put his phone away and went back to his spreadsheet.

Aki Cronqvist had been Matthias's closest friend for five years, the product of a seating arrangement at a company training weekend that had stranded them together at the same table for seven hours and found them, by the end of it, in the comfortable and unspoken agreement of people who have decided to continue the conversation indefinitely. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and possessed of the specific low-energy sociability of someone who could talk to anyone but chose carefully who he bothered to maintain. He kept his dark hair short and his opinions dry. He laughed at most things and meant it.

Matthias had known him for five years as a person who took Fridays seriously, was better than average at cards, and had a standing order at the nearest izakaya that the staff fulfilled without needing to be asked.

He had not, until approximately forty-eight hours ago, known anything else.

Now he did, and he'd decided, for reasons he hadn't fully articulated even to himself, that the best way to handle it was to drive Aki directly to the new house, put everyone in the same room, and see what happened.

Aki looked at the house from the front yard with the measured appraisal of someone assessing a decision rather than admiring an aesthetic.

"Nice," he said. "Understated. Whoever chose this knew what they were doing."

"Astreal," Matthias said.

"Mm." A nod that contained more than it expressed. "Makes sense."

They crossed the yard. Matthias opened the front door and stood aside.

Aki stepped over the threshold.

In the space of a single breath, the room changed.

It was not a dramatic change in the theatrical sense, no crash of sound, no surge of wind. It was a change of quality, the way a room changes when everyone in it becomes very still at exactly the same moment. Belial, who had been moving from the kitchen with a cloth over one shoulder and the unhurried ease of someone midway through a comfortable task, stopped. Her expression, which had been warm and open, closed into something else entirely, something older and sharper, a face that knew how to assess a threat because it had been doing so across centuries.

Astreal, from the far end of the room, had already stopped moving. She had been still before Aki was fully through the door.

The light came without warning. A flicker of gold, clean and cold, nothing like sunlight, and then Belial was holding a staff that had not been in her hand a moment before: silver-shafted, cross-tipped, the kind of object whose proportions implied it had been designed by someone who understood exactly what it was for. Beside her, Astreal's hand closed around the haft of a tomahawk that materialized between one instant and the next, its head a deep, burnished gold, its weight evident even from across the room.

They moved in the same motion, stepped forward, shoulder to shoulder, putting themselves between Aki and Matthias with the clean efficiency of a manoeuvre that had been executed before and remembered in the body.

"Cronqvist."

Astreal's voice had shed every trace of its customary flat composure. What replaced it was not loud. It was worse than loud. It was a word delivered with the weight of everything she knew attached to it, every memory the name carried, every calculation of what a member of that bloodline represented in the context of this room. Her ruby eyes were fixed on Aki with an attention that was nothing like her usual surveying gaze.

"How did you come to this house."

Belial's jaw was tight. "How did you find him."

Matthias looked at the two women and then at Aki, who had taken precisely two steps back and raised both hands, open-palmed, not flinching, not scrambling, just stepping back and making himself readable. His expression was settled, his posture easy. He showed no fear in the way that a person shows no fear when they have already been afraid of this possibility for a long time and have arrived at an understanding with it.

"You're both very perceptive," Aki said. "Yes. Cronqvist." He said it without apology and without particular emphasis. "I'd have been surprised if you didn't notice."

Astreal's arm moved. The golden tomahawk's edge came to rest at a precise angle to the side of Aki's neck, not touching, not quite, but inhabiting the space with the specificity of someone who had measured the distance carefully.

"If you attempt anything," she said, "I will detach your head." She said it the way she said everything else, evenly, informedly, as a statement of fact rather than a performance of menace.

"If I'd wanted him dead," he said, "he wouldn't be standing here."

"Astreal."

Matthias stepped forward. She didn't move immediately, the ruby eyes stayed on Aki for one more moment, conducting a final calculation, and then, with a controlled deliberateness that made the concession clear, she withdrew. She did not lower the tomahawk entirely, but she moved it out of the geometry of immediate action.

"He's right," Matthias said. "I've known him five years. If he'd come to this with the intention of doing something about it, he'd have done it a long time ago without telling me who he was."

"Why," she said, "would a descendant of the Cronqvist line permit the reincarnated lord to go unwatched? Unchecked?"

Aki lowered his hands and took a breath that had the character of a man deciding to be honest about something he found slightly embarrassing.

"Because," he said, "I watched him for three years. I watched him file reports and eat the same lunch four days out of five and go to bed before eleven on weekdays. I ran the assessment as many times as I needed to, and my conclusion was that Matthias was approximately as likely to resume the full dark lord operation as he was to take up competitive yodelling." He paused. "He's too, human. In the best sense. Whatever he was before, this version of him is someone who apologises to the printer when it jams."

Matthias had nothing to say to this.

"So," Aki continued, with the reasoning pace of someone presenting a case they'd already made to themselves, "constant vigilance over a man who heated up convenience store rice for dinner three nights a week struck me as an unnecessary use of a Friday. I prefer, and I say this with full professional transparency, beer, cards, and not watching Matthias."

The silence that followed had a particular texture.

Belial looked at Aki for a long moment. Something shifted in her expression, not warmth, not yet, but a reluctant renegotiation of initial judgement. Astreal, beside her, said nothing, but the tomahawk dissolved in a quiet breath of gold light.

"If Matthias trusts you," Belial said carefully, "then so do we." She looked at Matthias, one eyebrow slightly raised, a question without words.

He nodded.

"So do we," Astreal confirmed. It was not warm, exactly. But it was settled.

Aki looked at Belial and then at Astreal with the expression of a man who has heard things described and is now in the presence of the actual thing.

"I was told you were both..." he considered the word "...striking," he finished. "The accounts were accurate."

"Saying so," Belial said pleasantly, "will not make either of us fall at your feet."

"No," Aki agreed, with a small smile that had exactly the right amount of self-awareness in it. "I'm aware. I wouldn't dare." He looked at Matthias. "I would also like it on record that I am not pursuing that particular avenue of poor decision-making."

"Noted," Matthias said.

The dinner was excellent, because Belial had been cooking since the afternoon and had committed to the occasion with characteristic thoroughness. The first portion of the meal had the quality of three separate conversations happening in the same room without quite merging, but Aki was constitutionally unsuited to awkwardness, it passed through him without finding purchase, and by the second course he had produced two well-chosen observations that made Belial laugh and a dry remark about the camera coverage of the front garden that caused Astreal to pause and then, briefly, almost smile.

By the third course it felt less like separate conversations.

Aki set down his glass and looked at Matthias across the table with an expression that had shed its usual irony for something more direct.

"You know," he said, "you're lucky. In a very particular way. Most people go their whole lives without..." he gestured vaguely at the table, at the house, at the totality of the situation "...this. Two people who have been building toward you for three thousand years. Who bought you a house. Who drove to your office." He picked up his glass again. "You wouldn't want anything else, with these two. You couldn't."

Matthias looked at the table. He didn't disagree.

Belial was watching Aki with an expression that had, over the course of the evening, travelled a considerable distance from the one she'd worn when he'd walked through the door.

"There is something you should know," Aki said, making the turn with the ease of someone who had been timing it. "There's another hero-family descendant living in this city."

Matthias looked up.

"Strauss line. Her name is Yuki Strauss. Half-German, which is, historically appropriate, given the family." He turned his glass slowly on the table. "She's been in the city for about a year. I've crossed paths with her a few times."

Belial and Astreal exchanged a look.

"I want to meet her," Matthias said.

"Matthias..." Astreal began.

"It's better to know sooner." He looked at her steadily. "You said the families were aware of the cycle. If she's here, she knows, or will know. I'd rather establish something in person than let it become a question mark."

Astreal held his gaze for a moment, then exhaled through her nose. It was the precise sound of a concession made against the grain.

"I can arrange it," Aki said. "It won't be difficult." He paused, and a look moved across his face that was difficult to categorise. "I should say, as context, even by my standards, Yuki is not what you'd call professionally zealous. The Strauss brief is theoretically the same as mine. In practice..." he turned the glass again "...she's more interested in Gothic fashion. Coffee. Cosplay events, I'm told, when the occasion arises." He looked at Matthias. "You'll understand when you meet her."

"More interested in Gothic fashion than in watching a reincarnated demon lord," Matthias said.

"More interested in Gothic fashion than in most things," Aki said. "Which, in my professional assessment, makes her excellent company."

Belial considered this for a moment. "The Strauss line always did have eccentric members," she said.

"Still does," Aki confirmed, and topped up his glass.